On Media

Obama: Media ignores government success

President Barack Obama said Thursday the media gets wrapped up in the failures of the government but ignores the many successes, our colleague Byron Tau reports:

Things like the IRS scandal is what drives news, the president said in a Thursday interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, despite the fact that Obama said that people on both sides of the aisle were outraged by the accusations that the IRS singled out tea party groups for bureaucratic reasons.

“You’ve got an office in Cincinnati … in the I.R.S. office that, I think, for bureaucratic reasons is trying to streamline what is a difficult law to interpret about whether [a] nonprofit is actually a political organization [that] deserves a tax exempt agency. And they’ve got a list,” Obama said. “And suddenly, everybody’s outraged.”

“That is what gets news,” Obama said. “That’s what gets attention.”

Obama cited Craig Fugate’s stewardship of the Federal Emergency Management Agency as an example of an important government agency doing a "flawless job" without getting any attention.